My Writing Style

I’m fully aware that I’m too wordy, don’t stick to the point and talk about arcane topics a lot, not just on here but in face to face conversations. This is partly just what I do, in the sense that I’m unable to do otherwise or employ it as a bad habit. In a world full of shortening attention spans and loss of focus though, I feel that however ineptly, this is still worth doing.

In the process of doing this, I continued this blog post in a fairly lightweight word processor called AbiWord which we stopped using because it had a tendency to crash without warning and without there being any salvageable document when this happened, and it proceeded to do exactly that, so this is in a way a second draft. One of the many features AbiWord lacks, and this is not a criticism because the whole philosophy is to avoid software bloat, is a way of assessing reading age. Word, and possibly LibreOffice and OpenOffice, does have such a facility, which I think uses Flesch-Kincaid. A blank was drawn when I said this to Sarada so it’s likely this is not widely known and in any case I looked into it and want to share.

There are a number of ways of assessing reading age, and as I’ve said many times it’s alleged that every equation halves the readership. When I was using AbiWord just now, I decided to write these in a “pseudocode” manner, but now I’m on the desktop PC with Gimp and stuff, I no longer have that problem although of course MathML exists. Does it exist on WordPress though? No idea. Anyway, the list is:

• Flesch-Kincaid – grade and score versions.
• Gunning Fog
• SMOG
• Coleman-Liau
• ARI – Automated Readability Index
• Dale-Chall Readability Formula

Flesch-Kincaid comes in two varieties, one designed to rank readability on a scale of zero to one hundred. It works like this:

206.835−1.015(average sentence length)−84.6(average syllables per word)

It interests me that there are constants in this and I wonder where they come from. It also seems that subordinate clauses don’t matter here and there’s no distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, which seems weird.

The grade version is:

0.39(average sentence length)+11.8(average syllables per word)−15.59

This has a cultural bias because of school grades in the US. I don’t know how this maps onto other systems, because children start school at different ages in different places and learn to read officially at different stages depending on the country. Some, but not all of the others do the same.

Gunning Fog sounds like something you do to increase clarity and I wonder if that’s one reason it’s called that or whether there are two people out there called Gunning and Fog. It goes like this:

0.4((words/sentences)+100(complex words/words))

“Complex words” are those with more than two syllables. This is said to yield a number corresponding to the years of formal education, which makes me wonder about unschooling to be honest, but it’s less culturally bound than Flesch-Kincaid’s grade version.

SMOG rather entertainingly stands for “Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook”! Rather surprisingly for something described as simple, it includes a square root:

This is used in health communication, so it was presumably the measure that led to diabetes leaflets being re-written for a nine-year old’s level of literacy. I don’t know what you do if your passage is fewer than thirty sentences long unless you just start repeating it. Again, it gives a grade level.

Coleman-Liau really is nice and simple:

0.0588L−0.296S−15.8

L is the mean number of letters per one hundred words and S is the average number of sentences in that. This again yields grade level, although it looks like it can be altered quite easily by changing the final term. It seems to have a similar problem to SMOG with short passages, although I suppose in both cases it might objectively just not be clear how easily read brief passages are.

The ARI uses word and sentence length and gives rise to grade level again:

4.71(characters per word)+0.5(words per sentence)−21.43

Presumably it says “characters” because of things like hyphens, which would make hyphenation contribute to difficulty in reading. I’m not sure this is so.

The final measure is the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, which again produces a grade level. It uses a list of three thousand words fourth-grade American students generally understood in a survey, any word not on that list being considered “difficult”:

There are different ways to apply each of these and they’re designed for different purposes. I don’t know if there are European versions of these or how they vary for language. The final one, for example, takes familiarity into account as well as length.

When I’ve applied these to the usual content of my blog, reading age usually comes out at university degree graduate level, which might seem high but it leads me to wonder about rather a lot of stuff. For instance, something like sixty percent of young Britons today go to university, so producing text at that level, if accurate, could be expected to reach more than half the adult population. However, the average reading age in Britain is supposed to be between nine and eleven, some say nine, and that explains why health leaflets need to be pitched at that level. All that said, I do also wonder how nuanced this take is. I think, for example, that Scotland and England (don’t know about Wales I’m afraid, sorry) have different attitudes towards learning and education, and that in England education is often frowned upon as making someone an outsider to a much greater extent than here, and this would of course drag down the average reading age. That’s not, however, reflected in the statistics and Scottish reading age is said to be the same as the British one. I want to emphasise very strongly here that I am not in any way trying to claim that literacy goes hand in hand with intelligence. I have issues with the very concept of intelligence to be honest but besides that, no, there is not a hereditary upper class of more intelligent people by any means. Send a working class child to Eaton and Oxbridge and they will come out in the same way. I don’t know how to reconcile my perception.

But I do also wonder about the nature of tertiary education in this respect. Different degree subjects involve different skills, varying time spent reading and different reading matter, and I’d be surprised if this leads to an homogenous increase in reading age. There’s a joke: “Yesterday I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer’. Today I are one”. Maybe a Swede? Seriously though, although that’s most unfair, it still seems to me that someone with an English degree can probably read more fluently than someone with a maths one, and the opposite is also true with, well, being good at maths! This seems to make sense. The 1979 book ‘Scientists Must Write’, by Robert Barrass tries to address the issue of impenetrability in scientific texts, and Albert Einstein once said, well, he is supposed to have said a lot of things he actually didn’t so maybe he didn’t say this either, but the sentiment has been expressed that if you can’t explain something to a small child you don’t understand it yourself.

I should point out that I haven’t always been like this. I used to edit a newsletter for brevity, for example, and up until I started my Masters I used to express myself very clearly. I also once did an experiment, and I can’t remember how this opportunity arose, where I submitted an essay in plain English and then carefully re-wrote it using near-synonyms and longer sentences and ended up getting a better grade for the “enhanced” version, and it wasn’t an English essay where I might’ve gotten marks for vocabulary. On another occasion I was doing a chemistry exam (I may have mentioned this elsewhere) and there was a question on what an ion exchange column did, and I had no idea at the time, so I reworded the question in the answer as something like “an ion exchange column swaps charged atoms using a vertical cylindrical arrangement of material”, i.e. “an ion exchange column is an ion exchange column”, and got full marks for it without understanding anything at all. This later led me to consider the question of how much learning is really just about using language in a particular way.

So there is the question of whether a particular style of writing puts people off unnecessarily and is a flaw in the writer, which might be addressed. This is all true. Even so, I don’t think it would always be possible to express things that simply and also it’s a bit sad to be forced to do so rather than delighting in the expressiveness of our language. Are all those words just going to sit around in the OED never to be used again? But it can be taken too far. Jacques Lacan, for example, tried to make a virtue of writing in an obscurantist style in order to mimic the experience of a psychoanalyst not grasping what a patient is saying by creating reading without understanding, and in particular was concerned to avoid over-simplifying its concepts. Now I’ve just mentioned Lacan, and I don’t know who reading this will know about him. Nor do I know how I would find that out.

I’m not trying to do what he does. Primarily, I am trying to avoid talking down to people and to buck the trend I perceive of shrinking attention and growing tendencies to dumb things down, just not to think clearly and hard. Maybe that isn’t happening. Perhaps it’s my time of life. Nonetheless, this is what I’m trying to do, for two reasons. One is that talking down to people is disrespectful. I’m not going to use short and simple words and sentence structures because that to me bears a subtext that my readers are “stupid”. The other is that people generally don’t benefit from avoiding thinking deeply about things and being poorly-informed. It’s in order here to talk about the issue of “stupidity”. I actually have considerable doubt that the majority of people differ in how easily they can learn across the board for various reasons. One is that in intellectual terms, as opposed to practical, the kind of resistance found in the physical world doesn’t exist at all. This may of course reflect my dyspraxia, which also reflects what things are considered valuable. Another is that the idea of variation in general intelligence is just a little too convenient for sorting people into different jobs which are considered more or less valuable or having higher or lower status, and as I’ve doubtless said before, the ability to cope with boredom is a strength. I also think that the idea of a single scale of intelligence, which I know is a straw man but bear with me, has overtones of the great chain of being, i.e. the idea that there are superior and inferior species with the inferior ones being of less value.

There are, though, two completely different takes on intelligence.

Structure here: wilful stupidity and the false hierarchy of professors.

As I’ve said before, I try not to call people stupid, for two reasons. One is that if it’s used as an insult, it portrays learning disability as a character flaw, which it truly is not. It is equally erroneous to deify the learning disabled as well. It’s simply a fact about some people which should be taken into consideration. Other things could be said about it but they may not be relevant to the matter in hand. The other is that the idea of stupidity is that it’s an unchangeable quality of the person in question, and this is usually inaccurate. An allegedly stupid person usually has as much control over their depth and sophistication of thinking as anyone else has. Therefore, I call them “intellectually lazy”. For so many people, it’s actually a choice to be stupid. As noted earlier, there are whole sections of society where deep thought is frowned upon and marks one out as an outsider, and it’s difficult for most people to go against the grain. This is not, incidentally, a classist thing. It exists right from top to bottom in society. Peer pressure is a powerful stupifier.

There is another take on stupidity which sees it as a moral failing, i.e. as a choice having negative consequences for others and the “stupid” person themselves.  This view was promoted prominently by the dissident priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930s after Hitlers rise to power and in connection with that.  The idea was later developed by others.  This form of stupidity might need another name, and in fact when I say “intellectual laziness”, this may be what I mean.  It could also go hand in hand with anti-intellectualism.

Malice, i.e. evil, is seen as less harmful than intellectual laziness as evil carries some sense of unease with it.  In fact it makes me think of Friedrich Schillers play ,,Die Jungfrau von Orleans” with its line ,,Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens” – “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”, part of a longer quote here:

Unsinn, du siegst und ich muß untergehn!

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Erhabene Vernunft, lichthelle Tochter

Des göttlichen Hauptes, weise Gründerin

Des Weltgebäudes, Führerin der Sterne,

Wer bist du denn, wenn du dem tollen Roß

Des Aberwitzes an den Schweif gebunden,

Ohnmächtig rufend, mit dem Trunkenen

Dich sehend in den Abgrund stürzen mußt!

Verflucht sei, wer sein Leben an das Große

Und Würdge wendet und bedachte Plane

Mit weisem Geist entwirft! Dem Narrenkönig

Gehört die Welt–

Translated, this could read:

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!

Against stupidity the very gods

Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,

Resplendent daughter of the head divine,

Wise foundress of the system of the world,

Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,

Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,

Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,

Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.

Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,

And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!

To the fool-king belongs the world.

Now I could simply have quoted the line in English of course, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe in talking down to people and it’s a form of disrespect, to my mind, to do that, so you get the full version.  This is spoken by the general Talbot who is dismayed that his carefully laid battle plans are ruined by the behaviour of his men, who are gullible, panicking and superstitious, in spite of his experience and wisdom, which they ignore.  I think probably the kind of “stupidity” Schiller had in mind was different, perhaps less voluntary, but this very much reflects the mood of these times.

Getting back to Bonhoeffer, he notes that intellectual laziness pushes aside or simply doesn’t listen to anything which contradicts one’s views, facts becoming inconsequential.  It’s been said elsewhere that you can’t reason a person out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.  People who are generally quite willing to think diligently and carefully in other areas often refuse to do so in specific ones.  People can of course be encouraged to be lazy in certain, or even all, areas, because it doesn’t benefit the powers that be that they think things through, and this can occur through schooling and propaganda, and nowadays through the almighty algorithms of social media, or they may choose to take it on themselves.  Evil can be fought, but not stupidity.  Incidentally, I’m being a little lazy right now by writing “stupidity” and not “intellectual laziness”.  The power of certain political or religious movements depends on the stupidity of those who go along with it.  This is also where thought-terminating clichés come in because Bonhoeffer says that conversation with a person who has chosen to be stupid often doesn’t feel like talking to a person but merely eliciting slogans and stereotypical habits of thought from somewhere else.  It isn’t coming from them even if they think it is, in a way.  Hence the use of the word “sheeple” and telling people to “do your own research”, which in fact often means “watch the same YouTube videos as I have” is particularly ironic because it’s the people telling you to do that who are thinking less independently or originally than the people being told.  Thinking of Flat Earthers in particular right now, which I’m going to use as an example because it’s almost universally considered absurd and is less contentious than a more obviously political example, there are a small number of grifters who are just trying to make money out of the easily manipulated, a few sincere leaders and a host of “true believers” who are either gullible or motivated by other factors such as wanting to be part of something bigger or having special beliefs hidden from τους πολλους.  I’m hesitant to venture into overtly political areas here because of their divisive nature, but hoping that using the example of Flat Earthers can be agreed to be incorrect and almost deliberately and ostentatiously so.

He goes on to say that rather than reasoning changing people’s minds here, their liberation is the only option to defeat this.  This external liberation can then lead to an internal liberation from that stupidity.  These people are being used and their opinions have become convenient instruments to those imagined to be in power.

This is roughly what Bonhoeffers letter said and it can be found here if you want to read it without some other person trying to persuade you of what he said.  In fact you should read it, because that’s what refusing to be stupid is about. Also, he writes much better than I. That document continues with a more recent development called ‘The Five Laws Of Stupidity’, written in 1970 by the social psychology Carlo Cippola. The word “stupidity” in his opinion refers not to learning disability but social irresponsibility. I’ve recently been grudgingly impressed by the selfless cruelty of certain voters who have voted to disadvantage others with no benefit to themselves. A few years ago, when the Brexit campaign was happening, I was of course myself in favour of leaving the EU and expected it to do a lot of damage to the economy, which was one reason I wanted it to happen, but I would’ve preferred a third option where the “U”K both left the EU and opened all borders, abolishing all immigration restrictions. This is an example of how my own position was somewhat similar to that of the others who voted for Brexit, but in many people’s case they were sufficiently worried about immigration and its imagined consequences to vote for a situation which they were fully aware would result in their financial loss. In a way this is admirable, and it illustrates the weird selflessness and altruism of their position, although obviously not for immigrants. Cippola’s target was this kind of stupidity: disadvantage to both self and others due to focus on the latter. This quality operates independently of anything else, including education, wealth, gender, ethnicity or nationality. People tend to underestimate how common it is, according to Cippola. This attitude is dangerous because it’s hard to empathise with, which is incidentally why I mentioned my urge to vote for Brexit. I voted to remain in the end, needless to say. Maliciousness can be understood and the reasoning conjectured, often quite accurately, but with intellectual laziness (I feel very uncomfortable calling it “stupidity”) the process of reasoning has been opted out of, or possibly been replaced by someone else’s spurious argument. This makes them unpredictable and means they themselves don’t have any plan to their benefit in attacking someone. There may of course be people who do seek an advantage but those are not the main people. Those are the manipulators: the grifters.

I take an attitude sometimes that a person with a certain hostility is more a force of nature than a person. This is of course not true, but it’s more that one can’t have a dialogue with them, do anything to break through their image of you and so on, so all you can do is appreciate they’re a threat and do what you can to de-escalate or preferably avoid them. This is a great pity because it means no discussion is likely to take place between you, and they’re not going to be persuaded otherwise. They may not even be aware of the threatening nature of their behaviour or views.

Cippola thought that associating with stupid people at all was dangerous, but of course this feeds into the reality tunnel problem nowadays. This is what I’ve known it as, although nowadays it tends to be thought of in terms of echo chambers and bubbles. We surround ourselves, aided by algorithms, with people who agree with us, and this fragments society. Cippola seems to be recommending that, and with over half a century of hindsight we seem to have demonstrated to ourselves that that impulse shouldn’t be followed.

Casting my mind back, a similar motive may have been part of what led to my involvement in a high-control religious organisation. I have A-level RE. This in my case involved studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the approach generally was quite progressive and liberal, including dialogue between faiths, higher criticism and the like. On reaching university, I found that the self-identifying Christians with whom I came into contact were far more fundamentalist and conservative, but because I regarded this as demotic, the faith of the common people as it were, I committed myself to that kind of faith. This is not stupidity in a general sense, as most of the people there could be considered conventionally intelligent, some of them pursuing doctorates for instance. However, they did restrict their critical faculties when it came to matters of faith, and in that respect I was, I think, emotionally harmed by these people, though I don’t blame them for it. This is the kind of selective and deliberate “stupidity” which is best avoided.

I’m aware that I’ve described this all rather unsympathetically and perhaps with a patronising tone. This is not my intention at all and it may be more to do with the approach taken by the writers and thinkers I’ve used here. I’ve also failed to mention James Joyce and Jacques Lacan at all here, which may be a bit of an omission. What I’m attempting to show is respect, and what I’m requesting from the reader is focus (and I have an ADHD diagnosis remember), long attention spans and complexity and nuanced thought. I’m not asking for agreement, but I would like those who disagree with me to have thought their positions through originally, self-critically and with respect for their opponents. I write the way I do because I know people are generally not stupid and can choose not to be.

Now She’s Sixty-Four

. . . and also at peace with me blogging about this fact. Yesterday Sarada was sixty-four, also known as five dozen and four or exactly four times sixteen, in years. Consequently the Beatles song has been going through my head all day and I can also remember my maternal grandparents reaching that age and thinking of that same song. I was five at the time, and also at the time the Beatles were a recent memory for most people in this country, since it was 1973. ‘Sergeant Pepper’ had been issued only six years previously. I remember my grandfather growing vegetables in his back garden and hence “digging the garden, doing the weeds” stuck in my head, and I have a persistent memory of him sticking a gardening fork into the soil in Barming, a suburb of Maidstone. Since we are fairly vainly trying to address the garden situation, this also strikes a chord today.

My abiding memory of my grandparents, only three of whom I met, was that they were very old. Nonetheless in my earliest recollection, the maternal pair weren’t even sixty yet. Being the memories of a small child, this is hardly surprising but I also think people age more slowly today, as a rule, than they used to. I’ll rephrase that. Middle class White people in richer countries age more slowly today than they used to. It’s said, for example, that “sixty is the new forty”, in which case sixty-four is approximately the new forty-three, and since life begins at forty, Sarada’s life has only just begun. She’s also taken great care of her health, and this has contributed to her apparently very slow ageing.

At this point I should mention two related facts. Sarada’s birthday is only three days after our wedding anniversary, and I am a decade younger than her. This means we have an odd two days between the two events I never know what to do with. We also got married twice, so in fact the wedding anniversary we celebrate is the day after we went to the register office. We think of the second one, in the Friends’ Meeting House as a venue since at the time neither of us were Quakers, as the real one. I would also say that my attitude to marriage is reflected in this double event, since there is the legal institution of marriage or civil partnership and the more emotional and intimate, though public, ritual of a wedding. It’s a misrepresentation of my beliefs to say that I don’t believe in marriage. I actually believe that if two people choose to signal their commitment publically, in a ceremonial way, nobody should stand in their way, but this is not to be considered the way for everyone to go, and that there needs to be some kind of legal framework for a variety of issues such as custody, next of kin and probate which means that civil partnerships should also exist, given that there should be laws at all. This, as I see it, is reflected in our own double marriage. We made a legal agreement in the Register Office, but the real marriage is about Us and was performed in a secular ceremony a day later.

The decade difference in our ages means that I have been married for just over half my life for the past three years or so, but Sarada has not (yet) been married for half her life. I would say the age difference currently makes little difference, but to some extent I suspect the generational difference is significant, though not necessarily a bad thing. I’m a Gen-Xer but Sarada is in the little-known and little-considered Generation Jones. Since this is often ignored, I’m going to go into some depth as to what this means.

Most people are familiar with both the Baby Boomers and Generation X, but there’s a tendency to ignore the fact that the period between the end of the Second World War and 1965, the supposèd start of Generation X, is twenty years. This does make sense to an extent because it’s close to the time taken for children to be born, grow up and have their own children, and it shows up in the demographics. There’s a peak in population growth in 1946 and another smoother one in the late 1960s, into which I was myself of course born. However, there’s also a lull between the two, meaning that there is a distinct set of influences and experiences for people who are born between those two peaks, and Sarada was born near the halfway point between them. Therefore, if anyone is Generation Jones, it’s her. The word “Jones” has several overtones. It refers to “jonesing”, or craving after something, to “keeping up with the Joneses” (ironically, my next door neighbours as a child were called Jones but they didn’t try to keep up with us, unlike the previous neighbours), and to being anonymous, since Jones is a common surname. This last refers to their tendency to be, and to feel, ignored. They live after the peak. Lots of the cool kids did their thing, after which they hankered, and they then collide with the experience of being of an age group “after it was cool”, so for example there might be the perception of a load of swinging stuff happening in the West End which they are just a bit young to be part of, and this goes on throughout their lives. Now, for example, there’s the issue of pensions for older women in Generation Jones due to the movement of the female retirement age, and yet again they miss out. Their parents were not usually adult during the Second World War, although this isn’t true of Sarada’s father. It’s also notable that both we Gen X-ers and the Baby Boomers get a lot more attention than them because there are more of us and we tend to be better known and perhaps caricatured. They weren’t even named until 1999, whereas the Boomers were called that by 1950 and Generation X, weirdly, was coined in the early ’50s but the term was first used to refer to us lot in 1983. Hence I was fifteen or sixteen when my generation was first named, Boomers were only four or five, but Sarada’s generation didn’t get named until she was forty-two, another sign that their identity and distinctiveness stayed unrecognised for a long time. The very unfamiliarity of the term is significant.

Jonesers were children in the ’60s, and may have grown up with that idealism around them although it must be remembered that the clichés of that decade are not entirely accurate. In the ’70s, they were hit by economic decline and therefore disillusionment and cynicism, although Sarada is far less cynical than I am. They also tend to be less focussed on monetary gain than the generations on either side, and due to the economic difficulties of their young adulthood, they tend to have experienced deferred plans due to lack of resources in early adulthood. Therefore they tend to desire intensely to live out the ideals of their early lives, which seem to have been postponed repeatedly. There are also a lot of Jonesers because they tend to be younger siblings, and although the boom was over and the second boom had yet to occur, the trough of fewer births was very protracted and ultimately added up to more than either of the others.

I can see how a lot of this applies to Sarada’s life and those of her peers, but this may be like looking at a horoscope and picking out patterns which are there but over-emphasised. She is, however, atypical in a number of ways. Unlike many other Jonesers, she’s the eldest child of her family, and again unlike many others, her father served in the War. I feel I can’t comment on the rest because I’m not her, but she would of course be more than welcome to type a massive long wall of text as is more typical of me at the bottom of this post contradicting me on every point.

The main significance of our age difference is that we’re from different generations rather than our age as such. We’re both of an age where we did O-levels and got student grants, or at least our peers did, and early adulthood was also influenced by high levels of unemployment. However, there are also a lot of differences in our formative experiences, in particular in the area of popular culture such as music, but as we’ve often said, the gulf between music for the generation before the Boomers, the Silent Generation, and the consecutive generations after it is more significant than anything which has happened since in that respect. I do think, however, that we’re both of a time when it was still thought possible to change the world with music, whereas more recent music might be seen as artistically significant but not as particularly political on the whole. I have never had a relationship with someone close to my age, so in a way I don’t know what I’m missing.

Our atypicalities bring us closer, I think. This post isn’t primarily about me, but the combination of my parents’ age and the nature of my memory and cognitive development as a child means that I diverge from a typical Generation X person in a number of ways. My parents are of the Silent Generation, as are Sarada’s. They also tended to be late adopters and consequently I grew up in a world of reel-to-reel tape recorders, black and white telly, mono gramophones and Morris Minors even though this was quite anachronistic. I also inherited some of the stuff from my father’s previous marriage and my elder brother, born in 1959, so for example I read a lot of ‘Look And Learn’ and ‘National Geographics’ from the 1960s and listened to ‘Telstar’ on the record player, which incidentally I called a “gramophone”. We used a valve-based radio and didn’t get a telephone until late 1975. My bike was made in 1929. These are not so much significant in themselves as markers of my parents’ membership of a different generation than my age suggests. Other things are, of course, more of a leveller, such as schooling, pop music and so on. My father was thirty-eight when I was born and my mother thirty-four. If their mean age had been twenty-five when I was born, which was actually probably a bit older than average for their generation, I would’ve been born in 1956. I am, like Sarada, an eldest child although for me that means eldest biological child as I have two elder siblings. The other significant factor is that my cognitive development, though not my emotional development, was unusually fast, to the extent that I was reading up on nuclear physics and molecular biology at the age of seven, and my recall of the 1970s and even the late ’60s seems to be better than might be expected. Consequently there are ways in which Sarada and I did live in the same world when we were younger.

There’s a common breakdown of lifespan psychology which I’ve long felt raises more questions than answers. First of all, we have the mid-life and quarter-life crises. The first of these has largely been discredited. Many people, unsurprisingly, do experience adjustment difficulties associated with changes in their lives, such as separation or redundancy, but these are often perceived by those who have gone through them as the most significant life changes and are not particularly associated with age, and mid-life crises insofar as they do exist tend to apply more to men than women. Women experience the menopause, empty nest and the sandwich effect of caring for both parents and children, but generally manage, or perhaps are not given the choice but to manage, these things without them being acknowledged as “crises”. I would imagine empty nest syndrome affects most parents regardless of gender.

Just on the subject of family, there is a particular feature of our nuclear family which is noteworthy here: of the four of us there is only one person who is not an eldest child. Both Sarada and I are eldest children, as is, obviously, our own eldest, but our other child clearly isn’t and that has consequences for us, although I just mention that in passing. Both of my parents are also eldest children.

Back to the idea of life stages. I can’t remember which stages are said to occur during adulthood unless I go back to Shakespeare’s seven ages, but found them hard to accept because each seemed to have a choice of two outcomes at the end, which led me to expect them to bifurcate, but in fact the next stage was seen as proceeding from the previous one regardless of outcome. This has led me to doubt the whole idea. That said, there is, as Chrissie Hynde sang, “the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone who’s grown old”. I don’t think of Sarada as by any means old, although we are grandparents. It’s possible to be a grandparent at thirty though, so being a grandparent needn’t mean you’re old and it doesn’t even make you old. In a way it might even help make you younger, as you usually connect with someone of the youngest generation.

One effect of us both ageing, as is universal, is that the relative difference in our ages shrinks. When we married, Sarada was 13 146 days old and I was 9448 days old, making her 39% older than I. Today she’s 23 376 days old and I’m 19 678, meaning she’s now a little under 19% older. I think the main issues in relationships with age differences, probably larger than ours, are at the beginning of adulthood and in old age. The earlier end is obvious, but at the later end there may be an issue of one partner becoming the other’s carer, although this can happen both the other way round and at a different time of life even where there’s only a small age gap.

There are also other aspects to the number sixty-four which have nothing to do with the Beatles or life stages. It’s a round number from a hexadecimal, octal and binary perspective. Sarada is an exact multiple of sixteen years from her birth, so her life so far could be divided into four quarters. Our children were born in the third of these. It’s the number of different codons in the genetic code, although there’s a lot of redundancy in it. It’s the number of “layers” arrow notation has to be extended to to express Graham’s number, which is so large that if you tried to conceive of it your brain would literally become a black hole and collapse in on itself. It’s the smallest number with seven factors, all of which are powers of two.

On Uranus, like most of us, Sarada would be less than a year old. On Saturn, she’d be two, on Jupiter five, on Mars thirty-four, on Venus almost 104 and on Mercury 265. It might be nice to have more birthdays, but perhaps not four a year, and it might also be nice to be younger in planetary years. There are so many animals whose lifespan is around a year, so maybe we should all live on Uranus. In dog years, Sarada is now 448, except that in reality the lives of most mammals can’t be directly converted to ours due to the fact that we have long childhoods and also extended lives after our child-bearing and more intensively parenting years, meaning that the number of dog years to human is greater when they’re puppies and there is in a way no age corresponding to our post-menopausal stage at all. Then there are other species who are predominantly larval with a brief adult phase used to reproduce at the ends of their lives such as mayflies, who may have a three-year larval phase followed by a five-hour adulthood. For three score years and ten, and assuming adulthood at eighteen, a mayfly larva’s year is six of ours, but a mayfly adult’s hour is more like a human adult’s decade or even longer.

Then again, maybe there are Sarada years. I always tell her she looks about thirty, and to me she does. She definitely looks younger, as she has just observed, than Mary Beard, who is sixty-six apparently. That’s all I have to say really.